"Tο άλμα της Σαπφούς" είναι μια ομηρικης έμπνευσης Σαπφειάδα... Καλύτερες στιγμές της παρέα με τον Αίσωπο

This book is about to put me back in a reading slump.

With the resurgence of Madeline Miller's stories I have been on the hunt for more clever retellings of mythological stories and historical figures from around the same era, and I thought this one would be perfect. I had recently included references to Sappho's poems in my college admissions essays and was infatuated with stories about her native island of Lesbos, and I was very excited to read a story promising to fill in all the gaps in books and wikipedia pages. So I hate to say that when I closed the book, I did so with the most immense disappointment.

#1 The rough timeline
I did not like the story from the get go. Sappho's monologue on the cliff is meant to spark attention: A list of reasons a woman is about to die, making you want to read further to understand the stories behind it. But it was too revealing. She talks about her fame, her rumoured love for Phaeon, her daughter, her commitment to Aphrodite, her time spent in Egypt, her love affairs with Isis, the Pharaoh and Alcaeus and Praxinoa, effectively everything, before we even get into the official story. I hate knowing everything that is going to happen instead of getting to discover a new layer chapter by chapter. Even in stories like The Song of Achilles a retelling of an Epic most people know the ending to, there is colorful language and masterful characterization that makes it compelling, something this story does not have.

Secondly, the speed at which the story moves as well as the transitions are extremely awkward. She speaks about her father's love for her and then boom, he is dead. Within ten pages her mother has run to Pittacus, whose tyrannical reign could have been an interesting plot point but is reduced to a love interest for her mother, she meets Alcaeus, solidifies the first of her fame, leaves to exile with Alcaeus , falls in love, jumps ship, is rescued, and immediately married to Cercylas. This is all mashed together in such a fast medley that none of the individual pieces of information have time to sink in.

Later when Sappho is island hopping there is a common trend of ships wrecking, chaotic stays and their inevitable rescue that becomes incredibly boring due to the sheer number of times it happens. I found that I didn't care about her meeting Aesop and the Pharaoh or her time with the Amazons or centaurs, or the school she opened for girls, because none of those things were explored past the surface level, and frankly, it takes effort to make such gradiose events so boring, and I really wish that instead of trying to check every exotic location off a list, Jong had taken the time to isolate the story to a few places and really develop the characters and conflicts that came with each one. That, or make the story longer to accommodate all the things she clearly wanted to happen.

#2 Language
I briefly touched on how a retelling can be made interesting through language, and this book fails on every account of trying to read it. Everything felt very stilted and formal in a way that the dialogue was as suited to this time period as much as any other up to the nineteenth century.

I also take issue with the strange sexualization of everything. I understand that this is a story that heavily involves belief in Aphrodite and sexual healing, as well as the love affairs of a grown woman, but sometimes the sexual remarks and innuendos felt shoehorned in as a lazy reference to Jong's imagination of ancient Greece rather than anything that added to the story. I particularly feel that the descriptions of children were unnecessarily sexual. Take these quotes:

"Her sea-blue eyes blurrily sought out mine. Her little sex a pale pink shell."

"A little boy whose tender phallus would come to overmaster him and guide his fate."

"I was always glad I had borne a daughter. Her beauty and fragility never ceased to stir me in that secret place where fear and desire mingle."

All of these are descriptions of children, as young as her own newborn daughter. Not the fourteen year olds who were expected to get married at that time. Literal babies. And what was the point of describing them like that and putting their genitalia before their character and physical appearance? I see no reason this should have happened, and it's weird.

#3: Straightwashing, and Sappho's Relationships

It is still debated among historians whether or not Sappho was really a lesbian, but with heaps of evidence pointing to her lifelong love of women, it strikes me as a strange choice to make a man her soulmate and another man her downfall. Her love affairs with women also rely on problematic stereotypes: The weird power dynamic of the relationship between her and her lifelong servant that is isolated to sex rather than to any emotional attachment, Isis assaulting her, and her entering sexual relationships with multiple young students whom she had known since they were babies raised by their Amazon mothers after their flight from the island.

Sappho's male love interests are portrayed as better, but I don't buy it. Sappho spends more than half her life chasing Alcaeus, and when she dies, it is his arms she is reunited with. All because they went into exile together and knew one another for all of two weeks. He is the father of her child, but she never tells him that, and they never share any kind of bond over it. Phaeon is not meant to be a good love interest, but I do not think his actions were compelling enough to get Sappho to kill herself. This retelling deserved a cohesive and present love interest, and fewer bad side flings.

Conclusion

This book was boring and moved slowly despite the amount of events crammed into it, and I couldn't get personally attached to any of the plots or characters. The progression of time didn't feel well-executed and I found myself thinking Sappho and everyone around her was insufferable. She deserves a better retelling than this.

3.5
Since I'm a huge fan of mythology I cannot give this book less than 3.5 stars for its mythological aspects.
However, the book was boring at times and some parts were honestly sickening but nothing else is to be expected from the Greek gods.

This was a novel that I felt I should have loved but I just didn't. I don't really know why but I found turning the pages a struggle and very nearly gave up. Sappho irritated me abit and I found the middle of the book a little lackluster. The one element of this book I did like though were the conversations between Aphrodite and Zeus they were the most entertaining part.

this was so bad!! 2 main reasons:

1) most of sappho's relationships in this book (platonic as well as romantic!) are with men. sappho may have loved men, but loving women was a central theme in her life and legacy. to have her pine over one man for the entirety of the book is honestly offensive! as she goes through trials and tribulations she thinks only of him. the relationships sappho does have with women are much less central to the book. there is mention of her being involved with praxinoa, a girl who has been her slave since childhood, but it's written as more of a friends-with-benefits type deal, or of girls who grew up together experimenting more than any real romance. the only romantic relationship sappho really has with a woman is with a priestess isis, and that ends in a major betrayal. sappho's platonic family relationships are also troubled - she does not get along well with her mother, her daughter, or her sister in law. i found a lot of internalized misogyny in the way sappho interacted with and thought of other women that was honestly crushing. does erica jong really think so little of her own gender? this book was an insult to sappho's memory. finally, to have sappho end up living on an island, happily ever after, with alcaeus and aesop was crushing! sappho is known for her love of women, not of her domestic desire for men.

2) bad writing. the prose itself was just not good. I also found the characters to be really one-dimensional, especially the antagonists (especially rhodopis). no one really changed or grew throughout the book other than sappho. the ending also felt very rushed, and not really connected to the rest of the story. phaon came out of nowhere, and the idea that sappho was so distraught over what he did that she would contemplate suicide? after all that she had been through, all the time she spent pining over alcaeus? just unrealistic. again in terms of writing style: nothing was done subtly at all. i especially hated the way the author talked about aesop and his fables. very heavy-handed. also, the book felt very didactic, like erica jong was trying to teach me about ancient greece rather than write a compelling novel. there was also a lot of repetition, and a lot of plainly stating emotions instead of leaving the reader to infer.

based on the cover and title of this book i had high hopes for this book but it did not deliver! i think there were some beautifully constructed individual phrases but i found most of this book to be poorly written and a disappointment to sappho's memory.

Sappho is an interesting person, but this book didn't capture her or her world fully for me. The history just wasn't there. Some of the mythological events were interesting when they were grounded in what could have inspired their stories, but others, such as Hades's realm, were too far out there. A word of caution about the sex would not be misplaced.

Malibu Sappho.

To be fair, I was on holiday, reading in poor light, so maybe I missed something, but after a few pages of me, me, me, me I got tired of spending time with such a selfish drama queen & began reading faster and faster, wondering if the character's shallowness was part of the plot & she'd get her comeuppance, but no, she just wandered about the fantasy talking about me, me, me.

Bleah!

The fantasy didn't make sense: if anything can happen, in any order, not linking into a plot, then why does any of it matter?

3.5 stars. There were so many beautiful quotes in this book that moved me. However, some of this felt really slow and I wished would have moved along while others I wished I’d gotten more time with certain characters. I love a Greek retelling though so obviously this already was going to be a win for me.

Oh, I haven't read such...well, shit in a long time. Yeah, I'm not going to be eloquent with this review. This book was terrible and I hated every moment of it. Honestly, I don't know why I kept going.

To say that this tells the life of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet famed for her love of women, is a lie. This was a Odyssey of self-loathing masquerading around as love that shoved in as many mythological references as it could find in a children's picture book. Whew, that felt good to say. This was not about love, this was about a selfish, egotistical woman and her journey on never understanding that what she is experiencing is the gods cursing her. As Sappho falls for man or woman time and time again, she gets lost in the pages of a mythological story that has everything from Amazons to centaurs. Perhaps, my issue is that I see Sappho as a historical figure, not a singer as she is portrayed but as a poet. She was too flamboyant and too much of a performer for the poet I have always seem Sappho to be. And yes, it is not bad to see a historical figure in a different light, I could have done without the fantastical use of every mythology figure known to the ancient Greeks to accompany her on her horrid journey.

And lest we forget! It had the troupe of all troupes! A love triangle betrayal! UGH! There is nothing I hate more than two characters having sex for no other purpose than to hurt another character. Again, love was never portrayed here. This book was cursed by Aphrodite for daring to think it would honor her.

Long ago and far away when something Lesbian meant it was from the isle of Lesbos there lived a famed poet and songstress Sappho. So scant are the actual facts about her life, it's an author's ideal playpen. Though one may muse on just how much of the author herself gets imprinted on these biointerpretations. Jong, herself a poet of some renown (so much so that she included a sizeble addition of her own Sappho style poems into the book), and now stranger to writing on sexuality, women's paths, etc. creates a Sappho who is compelling, brave, outspoken, adaptable and distinctly (considering her fame) hetero inclined and not altogether all that much of a feminist. Which isn't to say she doesn't play around, she does, prolifically so. So much so that one must make a conscientious effort to discard our semipuritan mentality in favor on the ancient world's barely pubescent age of consent and rampant bisexuality for all. Sappho is, above all, a servant of Aphrodite, and as such she preaches love, love, LOVE (alongside a sizable helping of pleasure) in life and song. It's an interestingly constructed book, starting off as a regular historical fiction and then, as Sappho goes on her very own odyssey, throwing in adventures of mythological proportion. Subsequently upon her return to Lesbos, once again historical fiction and then pure imagination land ending. It works in its own way, precisely because of the aforementioned scarcity of facts. Sort of a magical biography. I didn't love the book, but I did enjoy mostly. The writing was as frou frou as a book about poetry would have. It is as mentioned quite hetero inclined, which might be just the author's take. I'm not even sure I loved the Jongian interpretation of the main character. It read oddly longer than the page count suggested. But it was original and imaginative and a pretty entertaining romp throughout the antiquity. Interestingly enough the terms lesbian and saphhic weren't used in the way we've come to know them until 1890s, hundreds of repressed years later. What a world.

In this book, Erica Jong pays homage to the first great female poet of our Western culture and, although there are not many solid facts concerning Sappho´s life, the author weaves a curious tale, which seems to find inspiration in the epic tales of the Greek.

Since an early age, Sappho knows that her life purpose is to sing the glory of Aphrodite. Completely fascinated with the works (and charm) of the poet Alcaeus, she finds herself in the middle of a rebellion to overthrow the dictator of her home island, Lesbos. The coup goes wrong and the two lovers are separated: Alcaeus is banished forever from the land and Sappho must marry an old merchant. The young poet never forgets her first love and, after the death of her husband, starts a journey to find her lover, which will lead her to the ancient oracle of Delphi, the land of the pharaohs and the mythical realms of the Amazons and Centaurs, with a brief stop at Hade´s underworld.

The structure of the book reminds me of the classical works of Homer and Virgil – there is a hero, who has to go on a very long journey and faces lots of perils, many of which are created by the gods. During the story, the main character is constantly praised for his/her achievements and, in the end, gets the most desired prize – a name in History!

Erica Jong´s Sappho is portrayed as a true feminist, who wants to be free of all moral constraints when it comes to love, sexuality and the typical female roles, in general. But, although she is quite spirited in the first half of the book, she starts losing her spark as her journey proceeds to different lands and, in the last part of the story, she just seems to be your normal romantic character, constantly pining over her lost love. Therefore, what seemed to be a 5 star read in the beginning just went falling down the hill and I cannot give more than a 3 star rating. I really enjoyed the mix of History and Mythology – the stop in the land of the Amazons is quite fascinating – but Sappho´s evolution as a character is just disappointing.

Amazing read! I tore through more than half of this on the airplane home from San Antonio the day Paula recommended it to me (especially after we talked about Greek mythology and Wonder Woman) and it was a wonderful journey. The writing is so beautiful and really transported me to the time period. So little is known about Sappho and I loved the invention here as well as her relationships with the cast of characters and some of the quotes, I did a lot of highlighting). I'd love to own a physical copy and check out more of the authors writing.